Thursday, September 15, 2011

Granola Thursday {sippy cups}

Before my job title was "stay at home mom" i was working as a service coordinator for Early Childhood Intervention (ECI). ECI is a program for babies, ages birth to 3, who have developmental delays, medical diagnoses or any other atypical behaviors. For example if your baby is 12 months and still not crawling you would call us, or 2 and still not talking or born with Cerebral Palsy, or was diagnosed with Autism...you call us. My job was to develop a relationship with the family, evaluate the child with a team of other professionals, and then coordinate the services for the child (hence the job title "service coordinator). I obviously learned a great deal about babies, but mostly all the possibilities of what could go wrong with a baby and then how to "fix" it in a sense. You know that book "What to expect when your expecting?" well theres a chapter in it that all mom's tend to skip or are usually advised to skip...its the "what if" chapter. It talks about all the things that have a chance of going wrong with your pregnancy, while laboring, during your delivery etc. Well, that chapter is a pretty good analogy of what my job was like, except for the pregnancy part... more like "what to expect after you expected, even though you never would of expected it." Too much?

Anyway, working with babies was one of the last things I really wanted to do at the time. I was fresh out of college with my Masters in Counseling, working at MHMR in Abilene, with depressed self mutilating teenage girls, adolescent boys with anger/behavior problems that were in & out of juvy, and elementary children trapped with ADHD. The ideal job I wanted. I loved my job, seriously. Something new every day. I wanted to counsel kids, teenagers, not tell parents their 18 month old baby was on a 6 month old level. I was terrified of babies. I had never even changed a diaper. But the Lord had a plan and though at the time it seemed completely crazy for these people to even interview me, much less hire me... working for ECI was probably by far the greatest most influential opportunities ive had so far. I remember in my interview saying this exact phrase "... honestly I know very little about babies in fact i've only had one semester on child development, but I would love the experience..." I remember walking out of there thinking "did i seriously just say that?" 2 days later, I got a phone call from who is now my previous boss offering me the job. I took it.

In the time I worked there I made some awesome friendships, which include: speech therapists, social workers, physical therapists, nutritionists etc. If anything is every slightly not right with hudson... i know just who to call ;)

A lot of things I do with Hudson are things I merely learned from my previous job. For instance, the sippy cup. I knew I was going to stay away from the sippy cup from the get go. From the speech therapists I worked with I learned that sippy cups are related to a lot of bad things; such as speech delays, ear infections, muscle development etc. Seriously, dont believe me? just google it... "sippy cup speech problems" or something along the lines, tons of articles will pop up. Anyway, boys are already more likely to have a speech delay than girls, so already having a strike against me I certainly didn't want 2. Did you also know that being able to drink from a sippy cup isn't even considered a developmental milestone? Babies technically should go from the breast/nipple to a straw cup and then to an open cup. Trust me people I know my development, it was my job. So how am I avoiding the sippy cup? Well once I stopped nursing, I opted for a straw cup instead. It took hudson about 2 weeks to learn how to drink out of it. The only "training" straw cup I could find was this one The Playtex Straw Trainer Cup. And I love it! Its only holds 7 oz but perfect for my 6 sometimes 5 oz drinker ;)

you squeeze the bottom of the cup to shoot the liquid up...which will then teach them how to suck on the straw. Its so nice for Hudson to just sit anywhere and drink. He doesnt have to be tilted back or held every time he eats. This has helped me out tremendously with being able to do other things while he eats. I'm also thankful to not have to do any "weaning" from a sippy cup or bottle. Now if we could just get rid of that paci... lol

I probably could write a whole book of all the little things I learned but i'll take it one blog at a time!